One fact people found interesting in my presentation to my blog group was that
'one out of every eight letters you read is the letter 'e'. This gave me the idea to expand my research into reading, how we do it and the science behind it.
- The average reader only reads 150 words per minute (wpm).
- Only 5% of readers read more than 400 wpm.
- Most of us can only assimilate what we hear when it is presented at 250 wpm.
- Most of us can assimilate what we see at 2,000 to 10,000 wpm.
- 4% to 11% of the text you read carries 80% of the meaning.
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| Average Books Read Per Year UK. |
Science of Reading:
We read not every letter but more like an overview of words according to word shape. The psychoanalist James Cattell presented subjects with letter and word stimuli in extremely short bursts and found subjects had an easier time recognising the words than the letters they were shown. It is also believed that letters when shown in words are easier to read than not, for example D is easier to decipher when shown as WORD instead of OWRD.
Another argument is that people find lowercase easier to read than upper, when presented with lowercase we read 5-10% faster. This supports the argument for word shape recognition due to lower case allowing the ascenders and descenders to give words more unique characteristics.
Interestingly when asked to proofread text for errors, if the error is more consistent with the actual word shape it is harder to detect.
Target word: test | Error rate |
Consistent word shape (tesf) | 13% |
Inconsistent word shape (tesc) | 7% |
We also struggle to read alternating text due to its sporadic shape.
alternating. AlTeRnAtInG. |
However there are alternative theories of how the brain truly reads, this is just the most supported and possibly most crucial to my studies because this is the main conclusion supported by typographers. |
